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Saturday, 27 October 2007

these children were born exactly one week later, october 27th. and as i sit here, typing with one hand, fore the other holds the male child, i tell you that they are what love is and what life is all about and why poetry is written. go forth and propagate!!!!

Wednesday, 24 October 2007

It was such a tight fit that my water broke 3 days later on the 23rd of October. I was admitted into the hospital that night not having gone into labour and the waiting game began. I sat in the hospital for 5 days before the babies came and that was too soon.

Saturday, 20 October 2007

I am almost 32 weeks pregnant now and from what I have read it is supposed to be getting tight in there for the little guys. They say you won't feel such intense movement but should still feel squirming. I still feel tons of movement from both of them and in fact often think that they have challenged each other to wrestling matches.

Other Moms have warned me that this was the hardest time for them. The waiting in that last couple of weeks. But now that I know that they are OK and big and healthy, I don't worry as much as I did around 16 weeks. For me that was the hardest time.
At 16 weeks I started to bleed. Hubs and I rushed to the hospital to be told after a very long wait that there is nothing they could do if I was loosing the pregnancy. The babies aren't viable yet...........aren't viable...what a strange way to refer to life. There was some peace in the nonviable 'ness' of it all. Not that I had a way out because going through that door was too painful to even imagine but I wasn't totally sold on being pregnant. I thought we would walk through the doors at emergency and they would rush to me, whisking me away and hooking me up to machines that go 'ping' and I would feel the sheer importance of what I was doing but we sat in the waiting room for 6 hours. Their response confirmed how I felt about the whole pregnancy thing, stunned, shocked and unable to respond appropriately. It was the longest 6 hours of my life, everything about that moment decided what our future held. Do I prepare for all the pain of loss or do I prepare for all the worry of figuring out what is wrong. Am I prepared to deal with either of those?

24 hours later we walked out of emergency with no answers. The bleeding has slowed down and the babies were fine. They had no idea. We went through it all again 5 days later and they still didn't know and they still weren't 'viable'. One doctor was kind and summed it up, she said that even with all the medical advances, embryology is still relatively unknown and most of it is still magic. Why did that sit better with me then anything else I had been told? Maybe because the conception of these babies was so medical? Just to have one scrap of 'magic' in this pregnancy changed everything. I stopped feeling like a medical petrie dish and like something magic was happening and maybe for the first time realize how much against the odds these beings are determined to be here and I needed to trust the magic. And then the real magic happened, I started to feel like a mom.

Friday, 19 October 2007

There is a moment, does everyone have it? Before you are totally awake that life hasn't set in yet. You have just opened your eyes but the reality of your life hasn't started.

I remember when I was had just separated from my first husband, that that 30 seconds of ignorance was the best of my day. Then the weight of the pain and sadness would settle in and the dread of the facing the day being only part of what you use to be. Rebuilding that part took a long time and maybe still isn't done, at least the shame stays.

Now I have a completely different experience. When I first wake up, that 30 seconds doesn't remember that I am pregnant, that 30 seconds doesn't remember that my whole world is about to be turned up side down and I am just me in the dim with the sound of a fan. I could be 5 years old or still a teenager or as life settles in realize that I am very old and at the end of my journey. But in that few seconds, as the hard drive reboots, I'm really ok and then I try to move and the weight of my belly reminds me and I am...................so much more then ok.......

Thursday, 18 October 2007

Pregnancy is weird and sometimes very gross. Some of this is covered in the book 'The Girlfriends Guide to Pregnancy' which I would recommend to anyone that is thinking that getting pregnant would be a good way to keep their boyfriend. It should be mandatory reading for all high school girls.

But the stuff they can't cover is the stuff that is going to be specific to you. The gross "Emily is pregnant" specials. Like, what is this valve thingy under my left rib that blubs and gurgles every time I eat or drink or lean back. With every swallow of liquid I can feel it and hear it.

Or why are my ankles soooo swollen? Not my whole leg or even my feet but my ankles. Like I have flesh colored weights around my ankles for controlled yet affective workouts. I get bruising from socks that are a little too tight.

Or why my sudden penchant for cankers? It doesn't matter what I eat or drink, I get cankers. I can get them bad enough that my whole tongue will feel swollen and too big for my mouth. Like my tongue is pregnant too.

Extra body hair.....everywhere!! I have always been fairly consistent about staying on top of my grooming practices and for the last maybe 7 years this has included pulling the occasional hair out of my chin. This has become especially true since I started having thyroid problems, but pregnancy seems to exacerbate this problem. They grow faster and darker and in truth it isn't just the chin hairs.............ALL your hair get thicker and grows faster.....ALL of your hair, even the hair that you can no longer see.....wink wink.....One night while laying in the tub I was trying to peak over my huge tummy to see what had become of what I could only assume was pubic hair biker shorts. I could only see the very tips of the hairs. My husband caught me doing this and when I explained how much of it I could see, his reply with wide eyes was "that's only the canopy of the forest babe"

I won't even go into the acne, constipation, hemorrhoids, or the huge quantities vaginal discharge. If that doesn't keep your boyfriend around I don't know what else will!!!

Monday, 15 October 2007

Today is the first day that I truely don't HAVE to do something. We have been so busy around here and the pressure is on to be ready for the arrival. It is like the months of planning that it takes to be ready for Christmas.

This weekend was the baby shower. I haven't even been to very many of these but this was a big one...FOR US!! We had close to 60 people and it took me over an hour to open all the presents.......the spouse didn't help at all.....I find this kind of intense attention over whelming but because everyone is so truely excited about these babies, it made it so much fun.

A million pictures were taken and because I always have such good fortune, my aunt Lizzie sat beside me during the gift opening, my aunt Lizzie who weights about 100lbs soaking wet and is maybe 5' tall. Now I am big, I'm almost 8 months pregnant with twins for gods sake! But if there is going to be documentation of the hugeness, does it have to be me with the smallest person we could find??? Besides that, you put 60 people in our house and it gets hot, so I am this bright red volcano about to burst in all the pictures. It almost looks like I am having a temper tantrum and holding my breath until I get the present I want!!

Thursday, 11 October 2007

"The faintest star in the night sky is Van Biesbroeck's star. It's only about as big as the Earth and is just .002 percent as luminous as our sun. Every other heavenly light outshines it. From one perspective, then, it's a puny little thing. And yet it is visible despite the fact that it's almost 19 light years away from us. From that point of view, it's an amazingly intense, potent, brilliant body. Is there anything about you that resembles Van Biesbroeck's star, Virgo? I think there is. Celebrate and show off that part of you in the coming week. "I am forever in love with Rob Brezney's horoscopes. They always make me feel a little special and never at a loss. He would never say..."You are small and unimportant and not as special as 'this other person'. Everyone else is better than you. Everyone thinks you are nothing and don't count. And when you aren't in the room, we talk about you constantly. In fact no one talks about anything else. Why when you don't count so much do we talk about you so much? You think this makes you special and you show it off."He could've said that but I like his interpretation better....

Tuesday, 9 October 2007

Baby books will tell you that you 'might' have very vivid dreams during your pregnancy...........This is an understatement!!!!

My dreams have ranged from crazy sex romps with other women, yes I have had 'lez-bean' dreams, although the first one happened during 'Pride' weekend here in Toronto and I thought maybe I was just celebrating diversity....subconsciencely...., to dreams about death or the most recurrent, the single parent dream!! I am searching desperately for the man that is the father of my children and can't find him anywhere or if I do find him, he is completely indifferent to the pregnancy and shrugs. Where this fear comes from I have no idea, cause if anything I am married to a man that is more excited about these kids then I am.......maybe cause he doesn't have to imagine their 'exit strategy'. Like Bush, this is something I never considered either!! I also dream about food a lot........

But mostly I barely sleep at all. I have always been a very heavy sleeper but now just the feeling of my fingernails growing is keeping me up. Or the dogs latest, incessant butt licking!!!! The sound of her slurping grunts while she licks her bum......leaving small wet spots in her wake...who could sleep through that??

Saturday, 6 October 2007

I had to....MySpace it couldn't support my HTML photo heavy code, templates and flash links ........I have no idea what I'm talking about....it's total bullshit.

I am still working out the kinks but I think with a good coat of paint we might like it here.

In truth I wanted to continue blogging but not have it attached to so much personal information including a list of friends etc. This way the door is open to write instead of write to: the 4 people that read my musings on MySpace.

I am feeling a need to keep track of this amazing time in my life. I kept writing at my old blog site through an IVF cycle that my husband and I were secretly going through. There was such a huge chance of it not working that we told almost no one, excluding our parents and most of our friends, in hopes of not letting anyone down. For this reason I never wrote about the "cycling" as they call it in the infertility world. I now regret this and wish that more of it was documented. I guess putting it to paper or screen would've made it all too real..... and it was real enough. So now I don't want to miss a second of this....pregnancy and babies, for me but maybe for them, the twins that are due in 7 weeks!!

About Me

I have been a writer for as long as I remember – stories, diaries, letters and notes that got passed under desks. Now this is the tale of learning to homestead in the big city, attempting to raise a family in a clean and nutritious way, trying be a great mom, a good wife, a helpful friend and contributing world citizen and how to quickly recover from the epic failures of trying all the above. This is my Life as a Mama, Gluten Free Recipe Developer, Food Writer and Wife